Delineating Transnational Family through Care Practices at Different Life Stages

The presentation is based on a small-scale exploratory research that applied life course approach to the qualitative study of transnational families. The research subjects are three women and three men who are labour migrants from Serbia to Iceland. The respondents are middle-class professionals at different life stages and with different family configurations. They were interviewed by semi-structured interview designed to reconstruct biographical sequences related to different phases of migration: emigrating, making decisions on staying in Iceland, current situation, and future plans regarding migration. I analyse and interpret how transnational familyhood (Bryceson, Vuorela 2002) has been made and is maintained through ICTs communication and practices of care at different life stages, particularly those associated with transition to adulthood, parenting, grand-parenting, and care for the elderly. While the ICTs enable family members to create a sense of ‘connected presence’ (Baldassar, Kilkey, Merla, Wilding, 2018), care practices are constitutive of transnational family life (Morgan 2011). The analysis shows that care giving and care receiving practices vary related to life stages. I plan to interpret those differences also through generational and gender perspectives. Starting from Morgan’s argument that family practices underline a sense of distinctiveness, that care practices directed to another family member also constitute that other as part of a broader family constellation (Morgan 2011), one of the aims of the presentation is to contribute to discussion whether different types of caregiving and care receiving practices in different life stages affect how actors define configuration of transnational family.